In this episode, I speak with Aiden Paladino, a social scientist who does a lot of great work on YouTube, about whether or not the right is more violent than the left when it comes to domestic terrorism and political violence.
00:00:00.160Hey everybody, how's it going? Thanks for joining me this afternoon. I've got a great stream with a great guest I think you're really going to enjoy.
00:00:07.140We've seen a ton of leftist political violence recently from the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the shooting of Donald Trump.
00:00:16.080We just had shots fired at Tim Pool. Other conservative commentators like Matt Walsh and Benny Johnson are receiving threats at their house from people.
00:00:25.260We see a lot of leftist violence, but over and over again we hear from academics, we hear from journalists, we even hear from Trump's former head of the FBI that it's actually conservatives, radical right-wingers that are the most violent people in the United States, most likely to bring domestic terror or political violence.
00:00:44.320But is that true when we look at the actual statistics, the actual data? Is that really how it breaks out?
00:00:50.280Joining me today to discuss this topic is a social scientist and someone who does a lot of great work on YouTube, Aidan Paladin. Thank you so much for joining me.
00:00:58.420Hey, thanks for having me. Yeah, I've been looking into this. I recently did a video about it.
00:01:04.340And for the most part, there is a lot of veracity to the claim that the right is more violent.
00:01:09.680But you have to go a little bit behind the front-facing part of the data to be able to see maybe why that's the case or what's really happening there.
00:01:18.480Because that part wasn't so obvious until you actually went through, I actually went through the data sets for that.
00:01:24.300Specifically, what I wanted to avoid with that is, as I'm sure you're well aware, oftentimes when you talk about violence or aggression or crime, they'll throw in things like prison violence while excluding things like gang violence.
00:01:37.860And that is a very easy way to skew data to produce a certain result.
00:01:42.760So when I looked at it, I just looked at terrorism, official reports of terrorism.
00:01:47.720There are two data sets that are used. It's the Global Terrorism Database data set, which is, of course, global, but includes the United States.
00:01:54.740I also ran a similar analysis, very similar to what I, identical to the one I did in the U.S., in the U.K., and found almost the identical, an identical trend.
00:02:03.980And the numbers were not precisely the same, but the valence was identical, and the effect sizes were nearly identical.
00:02:11.680And then the other data set is the, I always forget the name of it, it's Profiles of Individuals, Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States data set, or PIRIS.
00:02:20.920That one is, of course, a U.S.-only data set.
00:02:23.180But the thing to be aware of with both of these data sets, and with any kind of mass-scale data analysis, is that there's inclusion criteria that whoever is putting these data sets together decides on what goes in, what's kept out.
00:02:36.360So you have two data sets, and when you look at how many terrorist attacks has the right done versus the left, and they're completely oppositional to one another.
00:02:43.780Those two data sets, even just for the United States, covering the same periods of time.
00:02:47.600So that's an initial problem with it, right out the gate, right?
00:02:51.580Well, and that's definitely why I wanted to have you on, because I feel like this is something that the headlines just get out there.
00:02:56.960People look at one line somewhere, and they simply don't have the mastery to understand, you know, the data sets you're talking about, the nuances of how things are selected.
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00:04:09.880So, Ian, before we jump into the main topic, I was wondering if you could maybe introduce yourself and provide some background.
00:04:17.180Because I think you do some really interesting work.
00:04:19.560In fact, it's funny because I just had a bunch of leftists yelling at me that I was citing YouTube videos and Stubstack articles when I wrote a book.
00:04:27.160And it's like, well, actually, this is where the interesting work gets done.
00:04:30.720Your academic citations are boring and stupid because the actual interesting work is being done in all of these different spaces.
00:04:38.600So why are you doing serious academic work in a place like YouTube when, you know, obviously, traditionally, this is something you see from think tanks or universities, that kind of thing?
00:04:50.100What brings you to doing this kind of work on this platform?
00:04:54.160Oh, well, I was a graduate student and a doctoral student.
00:04:58.240But I kind of got, I got extremely burned out by doctoral school in particular.
00:05:10.080And I found that, actually, it's a lot easier to reach people by talking to them, you know, via the internet, one-on-ones, or so it seems, right, you know, than it is to try and teach anything at a university course.
00:05:24.380So, I mean, although I might one day want to go back to the university and to academia, this was a way I could do more freely what I wanted to do, which is just to actually find out the answers to questions or try to answer them to the best of my ability and share that information with other people.
00:05:38.180And the internet is far better at doing that in many ways than our universities at this point.
00:05:44.300Yeah, it's been my experience that when I speak to, especially right-wing academics, they tell me, actually, they just wish they were doing what, you know, you're doing right now.
00:05:54.040Like, yeah, they tend to find that, you know, trying to struggle their way through the university system, its restrictions are already stifling for leftists.
00:06:03.080But obviously, for anyone who has a different political orientation, it's even, you know, more so, and they find it almost impossible to actually get any real work done.
00:06:11.240So many of them are watching people like you and others and saying, okay, that's kind of the model I want to go to now.
00:06:18.480So I just think it's really interesting that at this point, in a way, the right has kind of created an alternative to university work or academic work that allows people who are promising, you know, who otherwise would have gotten lost in the system to be able to do interesting work like yourself.
00:06:34.640So if people haven't checked out your videos, they most certainly should because they are all very, very deep dives, as I'm sure they're about to learn here.
00:06:41.620All right, so let's start at the beginning of this problem, because as you said, there are some truth to the statement that right-wingers are at least more effective at violence.
00:06:54.080However, there's a lot of different things buried in here.
00:06:57.400I've seen other people discussing these studies say similar points about the selection criteria, that so often things are skewed because they're including prison violence.
00:07:09.060They make sure to exclude other issues, and that tends, you know, if you just count the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang as a right-wing group, then all of a sudden your terrorism goes up quite quickly.
00:07:22.080So can you speak a little bit, as you were saying there kind of at the beginning, what events are you looking at?
00:07:28.180What specifically are you excluding that often is usually included?
00:07:31.680And is there anything that you're excluding that you think other people are regularly including to skew the statistics?
00:07:38.140So, again, the two sources are PIRIS, the Provenza Individual Radicalization in the United States Database, and the Global Terrorism Database.
00:07:47.540PIRIS goes from, I believe, 1990 to 2019, or no, I'm sorry, 1947.
00:07:55.420And then GDT, Global Terrorism Database, goes from 1975 to 2018, with the most recent versions of those two data sets that are available.
00:08:03.440Now, that's a bit dated at this point, but those are the two that I had, and that should still, with a long enough time horizon, should be able to kind of give you an idea of patterns that might appear in those data.
00:08:13.920And again, with the Global Terrorism Database, I compared it against the UK because I live in the British Isles, and they're very culturally similar in many ways.
00:08:22.520So, if something were vastly different, that might be interesting to look at.
00:08:26.540Instead, what I found was almost identical.
00:08:29.260So, there is the problem with the inclusion criteria.
00:08:31.900For example, right-wing violence comprises 59% of the included attacks as they are categorized by the people who put together PIRIS.
00:08:40.700So, PIRIS data set says 59% of terrorist attacks since 1947 were committed by the right wing in the totality of the data set.
00:08:49.600But the Global Terrorism Data Set, for the totality of it, so worldwide, it's 6% of terrorist attacks made since 1975 have been committed by the right.
00:09:52.540And that had actually the exact same sort of trend in the findings that I was seeing coming out of PIRIS and GTD.
00:09:58.620So, but that, again, just prima facie, you can see that, like, there's a vast austerity in the way that data are handled and the way they're categorized.
00:10:06.660So, I also went through and checked, because the fantastic thing about the global terrorism data set is that they've included in this, and it's massive, massive, like tens of thousands of rows in these data sets.
00:10:18.380They have included, you know, all of the relevant information about a case, so that if there was something where I wasn't sure, I was unfamiliar with it, I didn't know, it was very easy to go back, trace it, and find out what this particular incident was, and agree or disagree with the way that the people who put together the two data sets may have categorized them.
00:10:37.760Now, my manual categorization is potentially as biased as anyone else's, but this is a problem inherently when you're coding data, but I mostly aligned with the way that there was an analysis by Jasko is the name of the first author that was published in last year, or 2022.
00:10:56.180They did an analysis of the same data sets, and my analysis almost entirely aligned with what they ended up concluding as well.
00:11:02.620So, there was some external validity in terms of other scholars have gone through it and come up with very similar conclusions as to the coding.
00:11:10.800What I found that no one had talked about, though, that's included in particularly the global terrorism data set, is that it contains information on foiled plots, and also contains information on death and injury rates.
00:11:23.080And when you put those things all kind of together, a different picture about what is happening with violence, who commits it, and why, and who causes more death and injury, and why, became a little bit more clear.
00:11:35.580Because it wasn't so much that the right is intrinsically or inherently vastly more violent.
00:11:40.600In fact, leftist plots were slightly more likely to be uncovered and foiled before they even happened, which means that some of them are stopped before they can even make the attack.
00:11:48.900And then when they do, they are significantly less likely to cause death or injury.
00:11:53.580And I don't know, it was difficult when I was writing this, of how to explain that without saying skill issue.
00:11:59.640Because, like, you know, it sounds awful.
00:12:08.620And when you look in the rest of the video that I put out on it, I talked about the psychological mechanisms that are going on there, who expresses more violent intent in their thoughts, and it's the left by far.
00:12:18.800They're far more violent in their intent.
00:12:20.260I think most people who have ever interacted with any of them at this point, on the internet in particular, internet exacerbates things, hostilities at least, knows that these people are very aggressive.
00:12:29.960And in fact, it was something like the far lefty tank subreddits were something like 47 times more aggressive and violent than the rest of Reddit.
00:12:36.560So even the far lefties on Reddit are, like, 47 times more violent than the average Redditor.
00:12:43.260So that's in their thoughts and words and actions and those kinds of things.
00:12:47.940But they are at least, what I found from the two data sets, the amount of attacks are nearly the same.
00:12:53.840But it's the severity of the attack and the outcome of the attack.
00:12:58.120Again, more likely to be foiled, less likely to result in death, less likely to result in injury.
00:13:03.460So it depends on the way that's always spun, and not unfairly, I'd say, is that the right is more violent.
00:13:10.640And this year, 2025, is the first year from the Center for Strategic Discourse CIS data set that left-wing violence, terrorist attacks specifically, have surpassed right-wing ones ever.
00:13:22.560As I think people may have noticed just from vibes outside of the actual way it's calculated.
00:13:27.700So, in a way, this reminds me of the suicide statistics, right, that women attempt suicide far more often, that men are more successful at actually completing that.
00:13:41.680So it's one of those scenarios where if you look at the raw data without the correct understanding, the correct context, it can make it seem, you know, the result's quite different there.
00:13:53.120So that's very interesting that ultimately the big gap is not that one side is planning more attacks or even, you know, committing more attacks, but one is more successful once those attacks have ultimately been triggered.
00:14:08.680Now, I guess you could say that competence in violence could therefore be construed as being more violent, but it's clearly not the intent of the left to be less violent.
00:14:19.100Yeah, it's probably not the answer I think some people want to hear because it gives people good feelings to think, oh, no, you know, the right's not violent.
00:14:29.040I don't know why you would want to think that, personally.
00:14:31.860I don't know why you would want to think necessarily that your side is incompetent and incapable of violence if power and politics are inherently intertwined.
00:14:41.520To think, to think, to say, oh, no, my side, people who agree with it politically are weak and pathetic.
00:14:46.800Again, I'm not advocating violence or anything like that whatsoever, but it's interesting that there's this tendency to want to say, no, no, the right is not violent, is incapable of violence.
00:14:55.360When they very much are, as is the left, the left is less capable, but as equal in its intent.
00:15:01.780And political violence is a thing that will happen pretty much regardless to some extent.
00:15:06.180I don't know how you would ever just excise that from society.
00:15:10.760When people get very upset about something, and politics tends to do that, very often that takes the form of violent action.
00:15:17.880Yeah, there is, it's very, America is a strange place, right?
00:15:23.880Because in one sense, we are literally a country founded on the idea of political violence.
00:20:21.640However, again, consistency in valence and trend, consistency across nations, seems to indicate there might be a consistency to the behavior.
00:20:32.280Interesting also the way that these things get categorized because of the way different groups organize, right?
00:20:37.720So you'd have, I guess, just general urban gangs, and that would not be considered political violence, even if they are at like a BLM rally or something like that.
00:20:49.260However, you get something like Proud Boys, and that is immediately considered to be a political organization, even if it's officially organized under something like a fraternal structure.
00:20:59.360And so the way that right-wing, quote-unquote, I guess, demography would end up getting coded is political whenever it actually organizes.
00:21:10.040As where left-wing demography, it's hit and miss as to whether those things are considered political once they organize into violent groups.
00:21:21.180But to be clear, the terrorist data set, or using the terrorist databases and terrorism data, is essentially a snapshot of it.
00:21:29.240Because you can't, it doesn't include that things like, you know, the various amounts of violence from rioting and from looting and from many, all the things that went on under BLM or during the height of BLM, that stuff's not included.
00:21:43.940So it's just planned and completed or planned and failed terrorist attacks from known groups in both instances.
00:21:52.720A peerist is a little, has individuals as well, as the name implies, but it's linked with a certain ideology or group.
00:22:00.840So that's, it's a little snapshot of a way of trying to look at who actually is committing more violence.
00:22:09.140What I looked at was just like this one little area that I was able to isolate out and say in this, because it was, I started looking at it after, of course, the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
00:22:17.060And it was, in that case, that was a, I mean, I would consider that a terrorist attack in some degree, but there's no affiliated group there.
00:22:25.200So they, that, that particular incident would not end up being included, either probably in GTD or in Paris.
00:22:31.300Well, we have the problem that, for instance, again, even the FBI directors have said things like, well, Antifa is just an idea.
00:22:39.960So even, even in cases where you literally have a named group with Facebook pages and organization and funding and networks, these aren't considered political terror groups for some reason.
00:22:53.580Interesting that, you know, originally I thought that your, the 2020 riots just wouldn't be included due to the dates that you were giving for the span of, of your data sets.
00:23:02.440But you're saying that even if they had reached in 2020 and beyond, they would not have included any of the Summer of Love, BLM riots, Antifa.
00:23:10.280None of this would have counted as political violence.
00:23:13.380Not for this, because they are looking at terrorist attacks.
00:23:17.520So it has to have been planned to some degree and carried out or attempted to be carried out.
00:23:22.720And if it was not carried out, then be identified and foiled.
00:23:26.360Those are the only things that are included, which again makes it of any data set you look at is going to have limited utility because you can't look at everything all of the time without too many variables getting too involved.
00:23:39.840And then you've got a very complete model, but it becomes very difficult to pick out what is contributing what to the full model fit.
00:23:45.720So it's like trying to explain, well, how much is the automobile industry adding to CO2 levels in the atmosphere that contribute to global warming, pulling that apart, that apart from all other emissions from the natural, you know, warming and cooling process of the planet, it becomes impossible.
00:24:03.380So you can try to look at little snapshots of data.
00:24:06.660And so for terrorism, as recognized by these two data sets that come from two statistical analysis groups, when there's such consistency, it's at least, I guess, interesting to point out because there's so many, I guess, misconceptions about who does violence, why, and why is there this claim out there that the right is so much more violent and so much more prone towards terrorism, for example.
00:24:30.800It's not completely based in reality, it's just a little bit more nuanced than I think most people ever dig deeper than they would, you know, they don't want to go past surface value, surface level, because then you might have some answers or rationales or things that might explain it that are a little bit uncomfortable for those just wanting to look at the rights more violent or why.
00:24:54.460Yeah, I think we've already tripped over a few of those, but okay, so we have the general understanding that it's not that the right is necessarily more prolific in its violence, so much as it is more successful in its violence.
00:25:10.340That's something you see consistently, not just in the United States, but like you said, across different countries.
00:25:16.180What other insights did you glean from your deep dive into the data?
00:25:20.020I'm trying to think of what else was particular, that was the big finding.
00:25:25.300There were some of the other things, there's the, I went into all the psychology behind it as well, and some of the psychology stuff that was more interesting about what, what is justifying the violence, and where does that come from?
00:25:36.380I started to look at morals, at people's moral frameworks, and you know, like the trolley problem and stuff, and what I found with different moral dilemmas, and what I found very consistently, across all of the studies that have been done on it, is that people who lean to the left have an outgroup preference, as everyone sort of knows now from the memetic weights at all analysis, the heat map meme,
00:25:55.200which they deny constantly, despite that being like one measure, there's about a dozen different psychometric instruments that measure essentially that, and it's consistent on all of them.
00:26:05.620But it's the same thing where they have outgroup preference, they will sacrifice the life of a white person, before they will sacrifice the life of a black person, or a brown person, or a person of another religion or ethnicity, etc.
00:26:18.180They also have this, when they have this thing called outgroup fusion, which they tend to get, which is not feeling like you were fused with your in-group, as people tend to be, I am an American, I am, you know, this, that, or the other, and there's some shared group homophily, we are the same, in some way.
00:26:36.380They don't have that, to the same degree, they have this very strange oppositional thing called outgroup identity fusion, where, you know, the free Palestine people are a perfect example of this.
00:26:47.540They care about Palestine, they care about Ukraine so much, places they didn't know existed until it became a media buzz.
00:26:54.100Those people in particular have, when they have that outgroup identity fusion, which are predominantly leftists who feel that way, are far more likely to say that they would be willing to fight, die, and sacrifice and give up their lives for the cause, than people who have in-group identity fusion, fusion with shared nation, fusion with shared ethnicity, shared race.
00:27:14.620People who have outgroup, they prefer other racial groups outside of their own racial group, other ethnic groups, other national groups, those people are more likely to say they would fight, die, and self-sacrifice for the cause of the outgroup.
00:27:29.460Which is funny, because I feel like that's not true at all, right?
00:27:33.480It's something they would say, but I think you put it to practice.
00:27:37.320It's not just that left-wingers are incompetent in violence, but it's been my experience, you know, when I'm speaking with people, that left-wingers are just completely unfamiliar with the realities of violence.
00:27:49.600They have this Marvel movie understanding of the way that violence works, as where conservatives tend to be a little more, they know, if they haven't been in the military or police, they know people who are in those professions, they're more likely to have done, you know, some kind of martial arts or something.
00:28:04.500Like, they're just familiar with the realities of what fighting or being in a combat actually does, as where leftists are like, well, yeah, of course I'd go up and beat, like, I've talked to totally delusional people who are, like, wildly out of shape and have no skills at all, or, like, the weakest people in the world.
00:28:23.300And they're just like, yeah, I'm gonna go out and fight these Nazis. I used to do that all the time. It's like, no, man, I know you didn't. Like, there's no, you are, you are as soft as butter, man. Like, there is zero chance you have fought a single fight in your entire life, much less that you're going out, you know, doing battle with skinheads. Like, but, but they really do. They go, they go around and talk about, like, this is something I would absolutely involve myself in, even though there's no connection to reality there.
00:28:47.400Oh, yeah. I've seen that, of course, myself as well. It's very pervasive. But it's indicative, though, that they are thinking about this. They're ruminating about violence quite a lot. And to excessive degrees in the way that the right doesn't, the rumination on violence. Sometimes rumination can cause to action, can lead to action, not inherently.
00:29:07.960But again, where you find the disconnect, then, is that when they do have to make that move from thought or feelings into action, they can't manifest the outcome that they want. And I think the, the recent shooting was at Texas, at the Dallas, Dallas ice facility, where Shaw was trying to, you know, shoot ice agents and ended up shooting and killing, I think, three, the detainees.
00:29:31.200Yeah. Which was, it happened when I was working on reading all these data. And I was like, oh, my God, well, there it is. I mean, that's a perfect exemplar of that. That if they finally, I think maybe some of them do recognize that they're not capable of doing violence, which may prevent them from doing it. They don't have a familiarity with it. There was a very funny clip that went around maybe like 10 years ago now of a games journalist having to hold up a virtual firearm in VR headset and started crying about it.
00:29:58.160So I think there's a big disconnect there. They ruminate again, think about how all the violence they want to commit. And in their heads, it's, they're very, I think, convinced of it. But then when you have to transfer from those thoughts into actions, and then actually going and doing it, there's a big disconnect. And hence why they're not as good at it. They're not as skilled at accomplishing violence and enacting violence than the right tends to be.
00:30:23.520Yeah, I mean, I'm not going to claim any kind of incredible expertise, but I've, you know, a lifetime of shooting at the range and been in a lot of different training scenarios and that kind of thing. And it's just always bizarre, because again, I've worked with brand new shooters, people who have never touched a gun. I've worked with experts, guys who earn their living shooting guns. And when you look at those different training scenarios, and then you watch some of these videos that people will do about like,
00:30:52.520their leftist gun club getting together, we're worried about the homophobes. Now we're worried about the transphobes, we got to protect us. And we're gonna learn and you watch these people. And it's like, they can't get one guy in the room, to help them, like, just learn, like how to handle a gun. It's honestly terrifying. Like, I can actually feel my anxiety for them when I see them trying to train because they just like they're flagging each other with firearms constantly there. They have no clue how to operate. It's just bizarre. It's like watching children who like maybe got all of
00:31:22.500their information on an operating gun from a Jason Bourne movie, like trying to get at the range. And it's just, it's, it's terrifying sometimes.
00:31:29.580Oh, yeah. Yeah, I've seen a lot of those videos. What was it? I don't remember the name of which one was it? John Brown, a gun club? That's their big one. And sometimes they'll put up videos of them training. And yes, it's a bit, a bit sad. But I think that that is the kind of, I wasn't surprised once, you know, I go see it in the data. It's like, okay, well, that makes all this stuff make more sense.
00:31:51.860They are sitting there ruminating. They think about violence, at least as much. And then again, looking into it, it seems far more often, they're constantly thinking about violence, but they don't have the tools or the skills. I don't, it's not the motive. They definitely have the motive to do it. They don't have the skills to do it. And that's a good thing, I suppose.
00:32:11.240I think it's actually a positive thing that these people are not capable of violence. It seems that many people on the right in my, just, you know, interacting in the milieu seem to want these people to be more directly violent.
00:32:24.600I think the fact that they are kind of pathetic and unorganized might be a good thing. And people want that to have a bogeyman to fight against. And just that they don't want the right to be violent in any way. And I think, you know, maybe the data are all wrong.
00:32:38.580It's possible these data sets are completely skewed and BS. And I mean, I did go through them to check that they were largely correct, but it's totally possible because of things that are left out, for example, that they are BS.
00:32:51.280But from what I was able to pull from the potentially flawed, and again, I know they are flawed, as I point out, data sets, it's not an issue of the right is more or less violent.
00:33:02.960They're just more capable of actually, when they set out to cause harm, to actually cause harm.
00:33:09.700Well, I mean, I certainly don't want the left to be better at violence, to be fair.
00:33:13.360But I do think there is this, there is a certain aspect of this, I've spoken about it before, where the fact that the left is so cartoonishly inept with violence, kind of lulls people into a false sense of security, because they don't take that violence seriously.
00:33:31.060In fact, I made this exact reference when we were talking about, you know, shooting the detainees instead of the ICE agents.
00:33:38.140If the Antifa terrorist had murdered three ICE agents that day, I think we'd be looking at a very different scenario, right?
00:33:45.800I think there would be a much different level of seriousness when it comes to the Trump administration, the way they're cracking down, the way that the public ultimately is responding.
00:33:54.060You know, I think there's a reason that people had a much more visceral reaction to that National Guard soldier being killed, as opposed to, you know, just a random shot going by somewhere.
00:34:05.780And so, of course, again, I wish she was not dead.
00:34:08.840I do not want the left to be more effective at this.
00:34:10.740But I do think there is this kind of slow boiling of the frog that occurs because leftists are so inept that you're like, ah, okay, another one, like, it's kind of like Wile E. Coyote, you know, as long as he misses the roadrunner most of the time, it's a harmless cartoon.
00:34:24.980But the one time he catches the roadrunner, it's not so funny anymore, right?
00:34:37.720Well, I mean, I think that's why Charlie Kirk's assassination was so shocking to people.
00:34:43.740Because, I mean, they took two swipes at Trump and didn't manage to kill him.
00:34:48.540And at least for me, the way that when Charlie Kirk was assassinated, I thought there was no way he's dead because, I mean, they keep missing Trump.
00:34:58.060But and it does maybe lull people into a false sense of security.
00:35:01.260But I think the thing that I tried to be clear about in my videos is exactly is that these people are extremely violent in their thoughts just because they're incapable or not incapable, just because they're incompetent doesn't mean they are inherently not capable of being capable.
00:35:17.860They can. And if there's enough of them and because at this point, like I've said, the most recent data show that, well, this year, 2025 is the first year that leftist violence in the United States, at least as of the data collection set for at least the last 30 years, has surpassed right wing violence.
00:35:33.360And significantly so. It's about five times higher this year.
00:35:36.960Now it's by five. So I think it's like one to zero to five.
00:35:41.080It might be one now. It's in the single digits of the ones that were categorized by that particular data set, the Strategic Institute study.
00:35:50.500But if it's that much higher than the right.
00:35:54.600And what I also found is that if you look at it over time, if there's a year where there's more right wing violent attacks, terrorist attacks, the next year there'll be more left wing violent attacks.
00:36:03.360And it happens cyclically and in response to one another. And it was that way, looking at it back since 1947 and since 1975, you have one year more right wing violence.
00:36:12.620The next year is more left wing violence. Next year, more right wing violence. Back and forth forever.
00:36:16.940So right now, if 2025, once the data, you know, finished coming out on it, and it's true that the left has finally surpassed the right in terms of terrorist attacks, it means the amount of violence in intent.
00:36:30.140This is not necessarily true, but it seems to be implied or to some level, the violent intent that's going on in these communities has to be extremely high for them to succeed at this many as they have.
00:36:40.260So these people are on edge and they must be for them to finally surpass the right.
00:36:48.240Well, and you're right that there's a certain level of an inference here, but I think it's an educated one.
00:36:53.180When you look again at the response to Charlie Kirk's death, I think as bad as Charlie Kirk's death was, for a lot of people, the response was the really chilling thing.
00:37:02.920Because rather than turn around and say collectively, we don't do this. This is evil. This has to stop.
00:37:09.220We all looked. And yeah, some leftists did the, well, you know, you shouldn't do that. Violence is always bad.
00:37:16.100But just below the surface of pretty much everybody on the left was this, well, I wouldn't have killed him, but he had it coming.
00:37:24.300And this is just what you deserve. And when you see that as kind of the unified opinion of the left, not just the radicals, not just the extremists, but the average politician, the average news commentator, your neighbor.
00:37:37.880When you see that, like that really tells you how, as you're saying that whole left wing, even if these people are disjointed and incompetent and, you know, generally not as good at this, when there's that level of resentment built up on the entire left, you know, as you say, that the intensity is building and building and building.
00:37:58.280And that becomes increasingly terrifying. And it's interesting because this mirrors, I think, in more of the political science realm, something that we've worked with and kind of neo-reactionary thought, which is this idea that ultimately the left is the kind of the party or the movement of kind of gradual wins, right?
00:38:18.800Like they have this kind of constant entropic thing working for them. They don't need to be organized. They don't need to be centralized. They don't need to be necessarily effective because like the natural gradient of politics is that they're kind of unorganized violence or unorganized efforts are going to slowly wear away.
00:38:36.840And it's only when the right finally gets fed up and centralizes and becomes unified, they flip a switch immediately, right?
00:38:44.920The left is kind of always violent, kind of simmering, but bad at it. And then the right eventually gets fed up and just says, now we effectively come in and just crush this, right?
00:38:54.200Yes. And I covered a study that looked at exactly that too, or some analysis of data. And it was that normally when there is a conservative or right wing leading person in power in a society, there is less right wing violence. That isn't the case in the opposite, in reverse. When there's a left wing leader in power, no, there's not less. It continues. They continue to just, yes, be angry all of the time.
00:39:20.320There's no pressure valve that switches off for them. It just is always building seemingly, at least, you know, as of the last 30 to 40, 50 years, depending on the country.
00:39:30.620Because I also looked at data out of South America on that. And it also depended on whether or not people were supportive of terrorist activities, supportive of, you know, watching a terrorist action occur, whether or not they were supportive of that also was dependent on who was in power.
00:39:44.940And, you know, if there was a left wing group in power, then people were actually more supportive of left wing violence. But when a right wing group was in power, they weren't more supportive of right wing terrorist violence.
00:39:56.440So it seems that being in power gives people who are broadly on the left a sense that, oh, now is our chance. We'll take all of it. We'll take more and more, get more violent.
00:40:07.440And the right instead goes, OK, we've got power now. Let's back off.
00:40:12.260Now, obviously, there's a certain level of speculation here. But again, I think it's well supported.
00:40:16.660You know, thinking about that topic, you spoke about that out group preference on the left.
00:40:21.540And one of the things about having an out group preference is you have basically declared war on your own in group, right?
00:40:28.060That is implicit in that is that you've rejected your own in group for that out group, which means in my mind, you feel constantly under siege, right?
00:40:36.300Because you are surrounded by definition by a group you do not align with and you feel that you are willing to reach out to what would otherwise be a hostile group and kind of leverage them back against your own in group.
00:40:49.340And so I feel like that is why, to some extent, leftists are more constantly angered, working towards violence.
00:40:57.660They find themselves in this just basically, you know, war against all, you know, because of the way that they view the world, the fact that they have eschewed their in group for the out group as where right wingers, once kind of their guys in power, they can relax.
00:41:12.360They're not in war with everyone around them, right?
00:41:14.760As where a left winger comes to power, they're just like, and now the revolution can really begin and let's get rid of that in group.
00:41:21.780And that was exactly what I found in the research on it as well, is that, yeah, it's not, they're not identical in that way.
00:41:29.740When they get a little bit, they push harder than ever.
00:41:31.860That's when they get actually sometimes the most violent.
00:41:34.080The right, when they get into power, they back off massively.
00:41:37.100And it's even just having support, I found that in analysis of European countries, that when there was a right wing populist party, right wing support for violent activism of any sort just plummeted.
00:41:48.160They had one, you know, there's a little bit of right wing populist representation, and it fell through the floor comparatively to basically any other country that didn't have right wing populist representation.
00:41:58.780But that wasn't the case for left wing populist representation, whatever that really means, how they categorize that.
00:42:04.000But it was only the case for right wing ones.
00:42:08.040So, you know, and again, I'm not sure if this is in your wheelhouse, but when we look at that choice of out group preference, okay, we can understand why in group preference exists.
00:42:19.500I feel like that's pretty obvious that there's an evolutionary advantage for binding together and creating this.
00:42:25.700And, you know, I've seen other guys like Ed Dutton talk about why something like Christianity was one of the most powerful weapons in kind of making the West what it was because it allowed for you to scale up in group preference.
00:42:41.600You had a new way to still keep the upsides of in group preference while expanding it to more and more people and getting the benefit at scale.
00:42:51.140So what would be the advantage ultimately of out group preference?
00:42:56.960Why would people choose that strategy for survival?
00:43:01.000Is it just the weak and the outcasts that are like, you know, looking for something else?
00:43:05.520I don't feel like that's true of many liberals.
00:43:08.300They're often rich and these other aspects that mean they probably don't need, you know, to bring in like some kind of foreign power to defend them against the in group.
00:43:20.880You know, I'm not really sure why they do because there isn't any strong evolutionary rationale to do that, except it might be perpetual in group victimhood orientation, which is a scale that has is very lacking in further analysis or something related to that, which is that one thing that you find across the people who identify as left is that they all seem to also be victims or very highly identify with victims.
00:43:43.500They see themselves as victims in their own lives, almost unilaterally.
00:43:48.120It's such a consistent theme in one way or another.
00:43:51.140They've been victimized by society, by capitalism, by, you know, racism, sexism, homophobia.
00:43:58.380Every single one has has a victim status.
00:44:01.840And I think that that appears to be a thing that binds them together.
00:44:05.760So I guess it's and in some of the very little research that's been done on perpetual in group victimhood orientation, which has been done in Israel, because you certainly have two, two groups there that both think they are perpetual victims.
00:44:19.100One may have stronger claims to that than others, but than the other.
00:44:22.260But I won't make it spicy by asking you which one.
00:44:26.040But, you know, whatever you make of that, clearly both sides think they are victims.
00:44:33.260And so you have a very interesting environment to study it in, study it in.
00:44:37.700And when people think that they are victims and they have a legitimate claim to being a victim, they think that they deserve to be given things.
00:44:46.460They think that they're owed all of this stuff.
00:45:16.600Well, I think this is a fascinating study.
00:45:19.720I'm glad that you dove into this because I have had this discussion in my own personal life, you know, and I and I and I, of course, knew that there was a lot more to this.
00:45:28.160And I had inferred several of the problems that you're talking about.
00:45:31.800But having that analysis is very useful, of course.
00:45:35.300And you do a lot of great work with social science.
00:45:38.460Again, people should go check out your work so they can get that background that you're not even getting in academia sometimes.
00:45:45.340Before we go to the questions of the people, where can people find your work right now?
00:45:51.220Yeah, it's Aiden Paladin on YouTube, A-Y-D-I-N, P-A-L-A-D-I-N.
00:45:56.740And I've got a new video coming up on myths about the psychology of Christmas.
00:46:33.060That'll be out soon if you want to watch that as well.
00:46:34.940My theory, I have not seen the video, of course, but my theory is that Hollywood is full of narcissistic misanthropes who hate their families and hate America.
00:46:44.960And so they just pour all of that rage and guilt and anger into their work.
00:46:49.680And because that's what people consume about Christmas, they just believe that even though that's not their actual experience.
00:47:19.820We got Quartz saying, it would be interesting to see how they would file Islamic terrorism or pro-monarchist anti-American paramilitary units in Canada.
00:49:08.660They're some of the most culturally conservative people in the U.S., but they are also the most likely to vote for the Democrats.
00:49:16.760This idea that there's natural conservatives with natural conservative values.
00:49:20.820No, actually, over and over again, what we see is the people who have the values vote for the left because the left is the party of taking stuff from people who are Americans and giving it to new people.
00:49:30.380It has nothing to do with your ideology.
00:49:32.720I also excluded stuff that was explicitly anti-government because or I put it in its own block and then ran a different analysis on that because what is anti-government depends on what the government is.
00:49:47.300I didn't want to deal with the Ted question.
00:49:48.960And so, you know, so I got out the stuff that was like wholly anarchistic or just anti-government in one way or another that wasn't ideological to help make it a little clearer.
00:50:01.380Elijah Tymon says, how should I respond to young men who express the reluctance of the right to engage in violence is why we've been losing for the last century?
00:50:10.400Well, I'll say this, man, you're in a scenario where you have control of the government, at least theoretically.
00:50:18.380Right. And so this is why, for instance, after the response to Charlie Kirk's assassination, I said, we need to see as much action as possible under the color of law from the Trump administration.
00:50:33.800Right. There is great power in operating under the color of law, especially when you are conservative.
00:50:39.240We are the side of order. The right is the side of law and order.
00:50:45.020That doesn't mean violence doesn't occur.
00:50:46.880Right. As my friend John Doyle says, very cool and very legal, you know, elimination of the left.
00:50:53.060Right. Like we it's not that we don't want it done.
00:50:55.400We just want it done in an orderly fashion.
00:50:57.280We want people standing in lines. OK, so, you know, that that's that's really, I think, key.
00:51:02.960I'm never I'm not going to tell you that you need to be involved in violence, but I'm also not going to tell anyone that there, as we've discussed with the American Revolution, there is just like never this point at which violence is an option.
00:51:14.540Right. Like at some point when you're coming for me and my family and my kids, what not violence is the option.
00:51:56.100Yes. Everything very legal and very cool.
00:51:58.800Yes. Shaker Silver says might need to get ahead of Lindsay types using the Candace crash shot as an I told you so against the right that wants to win and not cut to the system.
00:52:10.680I mean, honestly, at this point, I don't I haven't even even seen James talking about this.
00:52:17.020I it's irrelevant. I know somewhere in the void he's firing off messages, but I Candace Owens behavior is currently, I think, bad.
00:52:27.600I think we can kind of generally decry that. I think we just point that out and move on.
00:52:31.780We don't have to give any credit to anyone that it's easy for us that disagree with James to point out that she has behavior as it is for him to point that out.
00:52:40.820So let's just all point that out and not give him any air.